'I'll chip in a 1934 dollar,' Ralf Ackerman said, reaching for his wallet. In a sotto voce aside to Eric he said, 'Or does old papa Virgil have it that the colored kid isn't entitled to a sled?'

'That no nevermind, Mr Ackerman,' Steve assured him. 'Georgie, he earn he sled; he not want tips but real and troo pay.' The dignified dark robant moved off then and was gone.

'Damn convincing,' Harv said presently.

'Really is.' Jonas agreed. He shivered. 'God, to think that the actual man's been dead a century. It's distinctly hard to keep in mind we're on Mars, not even on Earth in our own time – I don't like it. I like things to appear what they really are.'

A thought came to Eric. 'Do you object to a stereo tape of a symphony played back in the evening when you're at home in your apt?'

'No,' Jonas said, 'but that's totally different.'

'It's not,' Eric disagreed. 'The orchestra isn't there, the original sound has departed, the hall in which it was recorded is now silent; all you possess is twelve hundred feet of iron oxide tape that's been magnetized in a specific pattern ... it's an illusion just like this. Only this is complete.' Q.E.D., he thought, and walked on then, toward the stairs. We live with illusion daily, he reflected. When the first bard rattled off the first epic of a sometime battle, illusion entered our lives; the Iliad is as much a 'fake' as those robant children trading postage stamps on the porch of the building. Humans have always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there's nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment – the present – has little meaning, if any.

Maybe, he pondered as he ascended the stairs, that's my problem with Kathy. I can't remember our combined past: can't recall the days when we voluntarily lived with each other. .. now it's become an involuntary arrangement, derived God knows how far from the past.

And neither of us understands it. Neither of us can puzzle out its meaning or its motivating mechanism. With a better memory we could turn it back into something we could fathom.

He thought, Maybe this is the first sign of old age making its dread appearance. And for me at thirty-four!

Phyllis, halting on the stair, waiting for him, said, 'Have an affair with me doctor.'

Inwardly he quailed, felt hot, felt terror, felt excitement, felt hope, felt hopelessness, felt guilt, felt eagerness.

He said, 'You have the most perfect teeth known to man.'

'Answer.'

'I—' He tried to think of an answer. Could words respond to this? But this had come in the form of words, had it not? 'And be roasted into a cinder by Kathy – who sees everything that goes on?' He felt the woman staring at him, staring and staring with her huge, star-fixed eyes. 'Hmm,' he said, not too cleverly, and felt miserable and small and exactly precisely right to the last jot and tittle what he ought not to be.

Phyllis said, 'But you need it.'

'Umm,' he said, wilting under this unwanted, undeserved female psychiatric examination of his evil, inner soul; she had it – his soul – and she was turning it over and over on her tongue. Goddam her! She had figured it out; she spoke the truth; he hated her; he longed to go to bed with her. And of course she knew – saw on his face – all this, saw it with her accursed huge eyes, eyes which no mortal woman ought to possess.

'You're going to perish without it,' Phyllis said. 'Without true, spontaneous, relaxed, physical sheer—'

'One chance,' he said hoarsely. 'In a billion. Of getting away with it.' He managed, then, actually to laugh. 'In fact our standing here right now on these damn stairs is folly. But what the —— do you care?' He started on, then, actually passed her, continued on up to the second floor. What do you have to lose? he thought. It's me; I'd be the one. You can handle Kathy just as easily as you can yank me around at the end of that line you keep paying out and reeling back.

The door to Virgil's private, modern apt stood open; Virgil had gone inside. The balance of the party straggled after him, the blood clan first, of course, then the mere titled officers of the firm.

Eric entered – and saw Virgil's guest.

The guest; the man they had come here to see. Reclining, his face empty and slack, lips bulging dark purple and irregular, eyes fixed absently on nothing, was Gino Molinari. Supreme elected leader of Terra's unified planetary culture, and the supreme commander of its armed forces in the war against the reegs.

His fly was unbuttoned.

THREE

At his lunch break Bruce Himmel, technician in charge of the final stage of quality control at Tijuana Fur & Dye Corpor-ation's central installation, left his post and shuffled down the streets of Tijuana toward the cafe at which he traditionally ate, due to its being cheap plus making the fewest possible social demands on him. The Xanthus, a small yellow wooden build-ing squeezed between two adobe dry-goods shops, attracted a variable trade of workmen and peculiar male types, mostly in their late twenties, who indicated no particular method of earning a living. But they left Himmel alone and that was all he asked. In fact this essentially was all he asked from life itself. And, oddly, life was willing to consummate a deal of this sort with him.

As he sat in the rear, spooning up the amorphous chili and tearing out chunks of the sticky, pale, thick bread which accompanied it, Himmel saw a shape bearing down on him, a tangle-haired Anglo-Saxon wearing a leather jacket, jeans, boots, and gloves, an altogether absolutely attired individual seemingly from another era entirely. This was Christian Plout, who drove an ancient turbine-powered taxi in Tijuana; he had hidden out in Lower California for a decade now, being in disagreement with the Los Angeles authorities over an issue involving the sale of capstene, a drug derived from the fly agaric mushroom. Himmel knew him slightly because Plout, like himself, gleeked Taoism.

'Salve, amicus,' Plout intoned, sliding into the booth to face Himmel.

'Greetings,' Himmel mumbled, his mouth full of burdeningly hot chili. 'What's new?' Plout always had in his possession the latest. During the course of his day, cruising about Tijuana in his cab, he happened across everyone. If it existed, Chris Plout was on hand to witness it and, if possible, extract some gain. Plout, basically, was a bundle of sidelines.

'Listen,' Plout said, leaning toward him, his sand-colored dry face wrinkled in concentration. 'See this?' From his clenched fist he rolled across the table a capsule; instantly his palm covered the capsule and it had disappeared once more as suddenly as it had manifested itself.

'I see it,' Himmel said, continuing to eat.

Twitching, Plout whispered, 'Hey, hee-hoo. This is JJ-180.'

'What's that?' Himmel felt sullenly suspicious; he wished Plout would shamble back out of the Xanthus in search of other prospects.

'JJ-180,' Plout said in an almost inaudible voice, sitting hunched forward so that his face nearly touched Himmel's, 'is the German name for the drug that's about to be marketed in South America as Frohedadrine. A German chemical firm invented it; the pharmaceutical house in Argentina is their cover. They can't get it into the US A; in fact it isn't even easy to get it here in Mexico, if you can believe that.' He grinned, showing his irregular, stained teeth. Even his tongue, Himmel noted once again with disgust, had a peculiar tinge, as if corrupted by some unnatural substance. He drew away in aversion.

'I thought everything was available here in Tijuana,' Himmel said.

'So did I. That's what interested me in this JJ-180. So I picked some up.'

'Have you taken it yet?'